I just watched the beheading of Nick Berg. Sigh….. I shouldn’t have. I am stunned and I don’t know what to say…

“The best information environments will take advantage of the ability of IT to overcome geography but will also acknowledge that the highest bandwidth network of all is found between the water fountain and the coffee machine.”

– Tom Davenport

I am sitting here at the University listening to Kåre talk about Media Technology. He is very good and is much more interested in the undergraduate related issues than I am.
Last week the whole division went to Piteå for a 3 day retreat. It included many good discussions, bathing, a lot of beer and too little sleep. During some discussion the following popped into my head:

Sometime we forget where we come from. Why do we educate people into a dedicated role instead on giving them a knowledge base, i.e. giving our students a knowledge area to work with in the future?

Tuesday we spent at the Academic Music Center in Piteå where we among other things got a crash course in how to create a news program. I have a taped version of it and will make it available later. It was fun fun fun 🙂
Got back and had 1.5 hectic days including a presentation about E-Media on the net with the subtitle: “Do we need physical libraries”. It was basically only library people listening, but it was a very very fun presentation to create and present. My conclusion is that physical libraries are no longer needed, but instead information meeting places are needed and the librarians will be replaced by information diggers.
After the presentation I was as always “over pepped” and I decided that I had worked enough that week and I threw a spontaneous BBQ party. SUMMER time. I was really nice just to kick back and relax.
During Saturday we started building the porch on the front of the house. We went and ordered all the timber we needed and it got delivered today. More later… Anyhow during the afternoon I started digging and moved all the old stone plates (about 1000KG of plates and the same amount of sand). The digging continued over Sunday.
A fun thing is all this digging and building makes me full of energy.
Today, all the timber arrived from Beijers and of course 10 minutes after it arrived it started raining so I had to “run” with it all into the garage. During the morning I was called into a interview with a major Swedish newspaper. It was of course done over the net and we will see if he prints anything. Today has been very hectic day and I haven’t had much time to think and actually do anything.
Damn, the seats in the A117 room are bad. I have been sitting down 45 minutes and it already hurts. Is this what my students have to bear with ?

Yesterday we cleaned out the garage and suddenly we can fit our bikes in there without having to use a shoehorn. We threw away tons of stuff. It was hard work but you feel so good afterwards. During the coming week is “odd garbage week”, i.e. they come a fetch all the garbage you cannot throw away normally. The problem is that we have sooooo much garbage standing next to the street right now. We’ll see if they take anything at all.
Today we started preparing for the new porch on the front side of the house. I removed about 1/3 of the stoneplates and then tore down the old porch. We left the small deck for now. It is fun causing mayhem with a chainsaw. Unfortunately it broke down when I was cutting all the big pieces into smaller ones. 🙁 Need to get some spare parts (a tiny metal peace that holds the chain got bent.).

Tomorrow I am off for a three day division trip to Piteå for creative discussions, bathing, gocart and tons of good food!!! I might be online. We’ll see….
Have fun, Hakuna Matata!

I spent the day at Arlanda, Stockholm. Went down yesterday evening and spent the night at Arlandia Hotel. My favorite hotel at Arlanda. The venue was an IP-telephony day arranged by SUNET with the overall goal to spread knowledge about IP-telephony within goverment departments around Sweden. Lund and Stockholm are those that has gotten the furtherst but they have chosen very different ways. Lund are replacing all old phones with IP-phone services immediately while Stockholm take a more relaxed approach introducing it is time goes.
Overall the presentation were good and I personally learned more about ENUM but besides that it was mostly valuable to meet people and get the puls (which was mostly dead outside Lund and Stockholm :). The IP-telephony “boss” at LTU was there and it looked like he was leaning towards just keep expaning the MD110 with H.323 services. I obviously want SIP based services as well as that is much more expandable and I am very sure we will see many more SIP based services in the future.
One reflection from today is that there is still soooo much religion and strong feelings involved within the computer geek division. Do they really think it will make things move faster in the direction they want? Yes; I wrote they as I don’t really se myself as part of that group. At least I think I am tiny bit more diplomatic.
I am sitting on the airplane back right now as I must say that it was rather fun to get out of Luleå. Even if it only was for a day at Arlanda. I feel pepped.
A few seats away a young man (that makes me sound sooo old 🙂 is reading a magazine about tatoos and he just keep staring at those pictures. People are strange, in a strange world.
Next friday (May 7 13.00) I will be giving a presentation of e-media and the need for physical libraries. It is part of the libraries 10 year anniversary in their new building and I will be the final speaker. I wonder what my conclusion will be and if they will be happy with it 😉 Catch the presentation if you can!! It is only about 20-30 minutes!
Yesterday Tovah learned to ride her new 12″ bike. She rode on her own around the block. She is getting soooo big. One can hold real conversations with her know and she knows most of the letters in the alphabet. She can do basic addition (like 3+6).
A lot of text deleted… Another heavy issue is troubeling me right now but due to its sensitive character I cannot write about it here. More later…
Summer is almost here. All the trees that have been cut down behind my house makes huge difference. Now we have a huge empty area there which allows for one of my favorite things, barbequing 🙂 That makes me happy.
Talking about happy. I am trying to be as happy as possible (no shit sherlock) but it goes very much up and down. I have rather much been out of the “boss-loop” during the winter/spring and I have kept my distance from heavy burdens but as everything has a bad side so does that. The bad side is that I get more sensitive in bad situations. Hypothosys: The more bad situations you get into the the less negative impact each situation make on you. The key issue here is obviously to try to make bad situations into good situations, basically by talking with the person/s involved. Some situations you cannot always make any difference in and then you just have to live with it and keep working forward. Another important thing is not to plan to far ahead in life. E.g. me and Kåre today discussed recruiment issues that won’t happen until earliest one year from now and that feels to me like a good thing to “ignore” for another 6 months or so.
I have been spending some time in Orkut and a couple of days ago I got my first fan. Steve Pulver from Pulver Innovations. COOL 🙂 I always get impressed when “big” people notice me 🙂
Landing soon and I better get back to answering emails (sigh).

Now isn’t this cool? It is Google version 0.1 (version number invented by me).
Ps. I have a cold AGAIN! My throat hurts. That is what we get from allowing Tovah to go to child day care. 🙁